Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, [tech capitalists] are driving emissions sharply higher with their quest to expand “AI” and cloud computing.
To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming.
“AI may feel completely digital, immaterial, but its infrastructure is very physical. It needs land, power plants, transmission, water and fuel, and those choices can last for decades,” said the Harvard researcher, Gianluca Guidi, who based his analysis on air permits, corporate disclosures, community presentations and other materials collected largely by the research firm Cleanview.
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“It is a disaster from a climate perspective,” said Thomas Day, director of corporate accountability at the New Climate Institute, a Germany-based nonprofit that tracks corporate emissions pledges. “These companies are locking in huge fossil fuel projects that will become some of the biggest emitters in the world. It’s not like these are one-offs. We are seeing more and more of them, with no end in sight.”
Look, profit driven companies are only ever in favor of a cause when it either makes them money, impedes their competition in some way (very common when very large companies suddenly desire regulation, invariably of a kind that will be disproportinatelly costly for small companies that might enter their markets) or they gain more attracting customers thanks to the PR value of it than they lose in other ways.
So it’s all “washing” - ecowashing, rainbow-washing and so on.
The behaviour of profit driven companies is the equivalent to Sociopaths, so everything they do, they do only if they think it makes them more money.
The only exception to this rule is some privatelly owned companies were the controlling owners have certain moral values which they enforce on the company they own.
Choose A.I. providers powered by renewables.
Yeah. They are leading. Us to hell.
Not all leadership is good leadership.
You can’t trust corporate promises. They are even worse than politicians.
Why does anyone think any capitalist will ever do anything altruistically or selflessly? By nature, capitalism breeds selfish evil fucks.
Because people have been brainwashed into thinking that wealth=intelligence, and so they’re reliant on the wealthy to solve complex or complicated problems.
When we said “Rescue the environment”, we meant “Make a much money as possibly at any cost”. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
They made those promises before Trump. When Trump showed them it is fine to drop your masks, they all followed suit.
When the wealthy are allowed to own every business, they have an incentive to create commerce between the businesses they own.
This is true even when it would seem better for one of their businesses to buy renewable energy to stop having to spend money.
The only way to get rid of this incentive would be to take away all of the billionaires’ property or to get rid of the billionaires.
you would think every single one of these would use the combo wind and solar things were it cools down the solar panels as well as making more power. I mean even if it needs more power just for bragging rights.
To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants
So that’s what a smokestack industry is.
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