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Comment by nick__m | Hacker News Reader

Ruining concrete seems to go against extinction rebellion main goal. According to the World Economic Forum the co2 released during ciment production account for 8% of global co2 emissions, datancenter are estimated to contribute between 1 and 2 percent....

Math is not theirs forte!

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Well they didn't ruin a batch of cement at a cement plant did they? They ruined a datacenter construction project, specifically.

Did the Data Center get canceled? If not, then no it is not ruined and instead what's going to happen? Is someone's going to scrape up a whole bunch of that concrete releasing a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and then someone's going to pour down some more concrete which will increase the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So basically you think burning down an oil company HQ increases climate change?

That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.

What if every time the oil company got a new HQ, it burned down? Would that increase or decrease climate change?

Reading between the lines, you're proposing a kind of all-out war between, on one side, all the oil companies and other industries, and on the other side, a bunch of annoying dweebs who throw soup. I encourage this, I think it would be interesting to find out what happens.

This would still pollute less than the usage of the center. You're underestimating how much energy they use once active.

You are underestimating how much co2 is released during ciment production and overestimating what is released by powering datancenters.

In 2024, datancenter have consumed 1% of the total worldwide electricity production and are responsible for 0.5% of the co2 emissions.¹

1- https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...

cement is responsible for 8% I heard

That's for all cement in the entire world, not one data center. This math is not hard. Plastic is roughly 5% of our emissions but you would not point at one straw and say it is worth 5% of all emissions.

You just pointed at all data centers though.

Yes, because it's a matter of scale. Napkin estimate that you can do at home is that there are about 2.7b buildings, and half of them use concrete. 8/1.35b = 0.000000001~%. Compare that to 12,000 data centers polluting 0.1% of us. 0.1/12000 = 0.000008~. That's 8 zeroes past the decimal vs 5, so right off of the bat we can see that a completed data center is thousands of times worse than a concrete pouring.

The buried ledes here are firstly that a concrete building is a one-time thing, where once it's built it is built and that's that. (The 8% of pollution is a yearly recurring thing from the production of concrete, but an individual concrete building is done polluting once construction is finished.) On the other hand, an AI data center contributes its pollution every year continuously forever.

Secondly, the matter of scale. Concrete took billions of buildings to get to its share of the pollution done. You will be hard pressed to find anything in the world period that can be produced at that scale without causing significant pollution. It's almost miraculous that it's only at 8% globally, especially when compared to AI data centers, of which there are only 12,000. You could build a dozen buildings out of concrete every day for the next 40 years and on a global scale you would not move the needle on how much pollution concrete is responsible for. Do the same with data centers and while the math is a bit harder you will wind up being responsible for ~30% of the pollution on Earth.

I imagine their maths is fine. Their objective is to tackle climate change through raising awareness. That happens at the macro scale.

Ah yes, the majority of people obviously don't know about climate change!

It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.

I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.

It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.

(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)

You think they did math on this? No, all he did was have a tantrum where they got attention to themselves and patted themselves on the bat for doing something.

They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.

The ecological results of the protest are negligible, so I don't know why people keep bringing it up

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