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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

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

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

> 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.

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