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Comment by unglaublich | Hacker News Reader

AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.

It uses a bunch of energy, but not so much compared to moving yourself around in a car of plane.

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

I think it's much less cynical than that. People both fear and dislike AI, recognize that the "it may destroy my livelihood and commodify human creativity" complaint falls on deaf ears, and are latching onto anything resembling a credible ethical complaint that people may actually listen to.

Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?

Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.

> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions

The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.

But aren’t we doing just that? Many more people eating more meat than ever before?

Methane has a shorter shelf life, but is far more potent, meaning that any increase is worrying, and decreases could have a dramatic impact.

I'm not. If you are, well, I guess you can't control other people.

Yes, what a bright future where we feed our bodies with a soy slop, and our brain with AI slop.

Indeed lets tear down forests to build soya fields for all that fake meat tofu.

But the real meat requires much more soy for animal feed so it's still a better choice.

You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.

The point stands.

"I'm not going to stop openly blaming vegan products after learning it's actually beef manufacturing that consumes all this soy" or how should one read this comment?

What was your point? My point is that if more people were vegan there would be less deforestation. Instead of eating the beef that eats the soy, you eat the soy directly, which is much more efficient. It's unclear if you think it's false or if you had a totally different point.

Why bring the vegans into that when they are the ones consuming the fewest resources?

This is a common fallacy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088#47280922

I would be fine if LLMs disappeared tomorrow, but if I couldn't heat my house, I'd freeze to death. But I guess some would argue that everyone needs to live in a city with district heating.

The heating of your house is worth the energy of many thousands of llm queries. So only turning down the thermostat by the smallest of steps would compensate your llm use.

So, no you don't have to freeze to death to easily compensate your llm use.

A bunch of energy, water and Earth rare materials, nothing really to care about.

Which in turn are also relatively small compared to the damages of cattle and fishing.

Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.

What about putting trees down for soya fields?

Speaking of deforestation:

> Globally, 77% of soya is produced for animal feed, 19.2% for direct human consumption and 3.8% for industry (biodiesel, lubricants, etc.).

https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect...

Poultry protein efficiency is 21% and beef 3%

> We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

Edit:

Note the soy usage vary around regions. The first link is from a French gov page, after the previous citation it gives the world repartition:

> In animal feed, the largest consumer of soybeans is chicken (37% of world production), followed by pork (20.2%), aquaculture products (5.6%), dairy products (1.4%) and beef (0.5%).

Which is quite different than the French reparation :

> flesh and egg poultry account for 44% of total [imported] soy, then diary/mixed cows (36%) then flesh cow (8%) and pigs (6%)

(fr) https://chaire-bea.vetagro-sup.fr/en-france-les-animaux-dele...

Soy protein are 97.9% as digestible as beef

> protein qualify can be scored in terms of its Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS). Soy achieves a PDCAAS of 0.92, comparable to beef at 0.94.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

The DIAAS is sensibly worse (soy 0.898 - beef 1.116) but still far from the beef protein efficiency cited above (3%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...

It is also much more likely to use renewable energy. Data centers look at the local energy mix when planning where to put one. (though they are perhaps taking energy that would otherwise be shipped to a different city/state)

This is definitely not always the case[0], let's not pretend these companies give a fuck about the communities in which their data centers operate[1].

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

1: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...

Community has nothing to do with it. They are asking about energy mix because that is important to enough of their customers that it is worth looking at.

> AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.

Let's stop building homes to live in and use motor vehicles for travel. Smartphone with LLM access will fulfill all our needs.

> AI is nothing compared to automobiles and heating, construction and shipping.

When the oil in your frying pan is smoking, adding a tiny bit more heat may be unwise.

Yeah that assumes that AI is an absolute negative. What if it impacts positively? I mean you gotta spend money to make money.

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