Climate Goals Go Up in Smoke as Us Datacenters Turn to Coal

I can also get away with no powered cooling for my gear. ie: I need cooling well before my gear does.

It's not a long comment.

> we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently

It depends where you lived.

It sure did in China, Japan, Germany, large chunks of the USSR.

Civilisation was rebuilt, but it sure collapsed.

Perhaps the author of that comment comes from the USA?

We're killing what we eat (and what we eat is nurtured by) at a rapid speed, at scale. This will first show in bearable price increases (as it already does with coffee and cocoa) and only get worse from there, think famine (in regions where this has not happened in a lifetime).

Good luck with keeping a civilization 'stable' when people are hangry at scale.

And the worst part is: While war can be ended, un-extincting is not a solved problem at all.

OTOH why referring to something almost nobody knows, when it's basically the same shit in 'The Expanse" for most of the people on earth? They even have worthless UBI and free meals, and it's an absolute shithole in spite of that.

I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.

That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.

In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.

> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.

Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.

That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.

1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100?

2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.

This claim explains a lot about our previous interactions. It's also the polar opposite of my experience.

I have never heard a single advocate of nuclear advocating for fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do it myself. I've also never heard them speak against solar (and again I also don't do this). It's purely about defending nuclear from fear-mongering and trying to make it possible faster, rather than being crushed under ridiculous and unjustified regulations.

"The oil burning power plant is a natural part of the reserve energy plan, and replacing it with nuclear would be way too expensive."

After that debate, the green party (in combination with their other coalition parties) has now green lit the construction of a new natural gas power plant, as part of the strategy of using wind and solar during optimal weather conditions and fossil fuels in poor weather conditions. This strategy goes under the long-term plan of using green hydrogen in the future. Currently there exist a experiment of using green hydrogen for steel production, which has yet to become economical viable, and experts in the field of green hydrogen is predicting around ~50 years until green hydrogen may become economical viable for electricity production. Until then the plan is to continue expanding the fleet of fossil fuel burning power plants.

To me its very obvious who is trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years. It is those that fund, approve and build new ones. The people responsible for those decisions are responsible for the fossil fuels that will get burned, and in turn delaying implementation of non-fossil fueled solutions.

Only true because of the regulatory burden imposed by the government on their construction, there's nothing about the design or construction of the plants which takes that long.

Look at China, it takes them about 6 years to build a nuclear power plant. Politicians have been using climate change as a political tool for decades, if they had started pushing the construction of these plants back when they first started talking about the issue we could have been bringing enough power plants online by now to already have solved the problem.