That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
you've hit the silent nail on the head.
The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.