I live in a van full time. I have a 200w solar panel and a 1500w output solar battery that powers everything I use, mostly for cooking, sometimes heat. I also poop in the woods a lot. :) I do not use the internet much really. Driving is my biggest carbon footprint but I really do not put much more mileage than the average suburban person. Anyway, I try my best. I am permanently disabled so that makes a lot of it easier. Being poor dramatically lowers ones carbon footprint.
What a nice way to talk to another person who... didn't attack you?
A typical passenger car driving 12,000 miles puts out about 5 metric tons of C02
The person driving that passenger car likely has a 1,000 sq ft or larger home or apartment, which can vary widely but could be reasonably estimated at another 5 metric tons of C02 (Miami vs. Minnesota makes a huge difference)
So we're at 10 metric tons for someone who doesn't live in a van but still drives like a suburbanite
Care to be a little kinder next time you feel whatever compelled you to write you response to the other user? Jeesh.
> Burning 1000 gallons of motor fuel has the same GHG impact as 300 million uses of Google Gemini, and the CO2 impact of local inference on a Mac is even less
Still, even lets say your number are correct (and I feel they are not), does that mean I should just add to the problem and use something I do not need?
Driving my van for my yearly average creates about 4.4 metric tons of CO2.
"A more recent study reported that training GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters consumed 1287 MWh of electricity, and resulted in carbon emissions of 502 metric tons of carbon, equivalent to driving 112 gasoline powered cars for a year."
Just to get an idea of how I conserve, another example is I only watch videos in 480 becasue it uses less power. This has a double benefit for me since it saves my solar battery as well.
I am not bragging, just showing what is possible. Right now, being tsill this week in the desert, my carbon footprint is extremely low.
Second, I cannot really trust most numbers that are coming out regarding AI. Sorry, just too much confusion and green-washing. For example, Meta is building an AI site that is about the size of Manhattan. Is all the carbon used to build that counted in the equations?
says "by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households."
And
"Tallies of AI’s energy use often short-circuit the conversation—either by scolding individual behavior, or by triggering comparisons to bigger climate offenders. Both reactions dodge the point: AI is unavoidable, and even if a single query is low-impact, governments and companies are now shaping a much larger energy future around AI’s needs."
And
"The Lawrence Berkeley researchers offered a blunt critique of where things stand, saying that the information disclosed by tech companies, data center operators, utility companies, and hardware manufacturers is simply not enough to make reasonable projections about the unprecedented energy demands of this future or estimate the emissions it will create. "
So the confusion and obfuscation is enough for me to avoid it. I think AI shoudl be restaind to research, not to be used from most of the silliness adn AI slop that is being produced. Because yiou know, we are not even counting the AI slop views that also take up data space and energy by people looking at it all.
But part if why I do not use it is my little boycott. I do not like AI, at least how it is being misused to create porn and AI slop instad of doing the great things it might do. They are misusing AI to make a profit. And that is also what I protest.
