For instance, "Data centres cause pollution through high eletricity use" - high relative to what, residential housing? Aluminum smelting?
It's fine to be skeptical of the AI bubble, but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.
We also don't need any fizzy-drinks - shall we calculate the deaths due to pollution caused by that, let alone the primary effect on health of drink-victims? If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.
Actually, the real danger in society is AI and Big Tech is the only one you can trust. Everyone else should stop research in AI because of carbon emissions!
> but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.
Hard to tell if they're singling out AI because it's the current hot thing that everyone's talking about (and afraid of being replaced by), or if they're singling out "big tech" because they're rich and cool to hate on.
And with good reason - some particularly enterprising miners revived a coal power plant of all things. Other meme coins wasted insane amounts of HDDs and SSDs. I'm glad it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum that are left over these days.
The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.
>The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
The problem is that's basically entirely based on vibes. For crypto opponents it's justified by crypto not doing anything that the traditional finance system can't do, and for AI opponents it's justified by AI only being able to rehash soulless copypasta while stealing jobs. As a result the whole argument just becomes a roundabout way of arguing "[technology] sucks".
De-development is saying we have to e.g. stop driving cars. Regulations that make dirty power more expensive are the likes of a carbon tax, which you can avoid while still having a car by getting an electric car and charging it from solar panels.
The cars is a perfect example. Many people who want there to be much fewer car miles in toto will argue they're polluting, but will also not want anything that makes them not polluting - because they're not actually arguing for pollution reduction, they're arguing against the car.
Same with this, I feel. It's not anti-pollution, it's anti-AI.
You cant make a car not pollute. Even EV pollutes the local neighborhood. Ever notice how tires and the stains on the curbs and the black soot you wipe off the window sills are all the same color? How tires get bald? You are probably breathing tire right now. It is probably getting on your plate of food and you are eating tire.
Originally cars ran on leaded gasoline, which was very bad. But we didn't ban cars, we got unleaded gasoline. Then they were emitting too much in terms of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, so we got low-sulfur fuels and catalytic converters. Then it was brake dust from friction brakes, but now hybrids have regenerative braking. Then it was CO2, so we got electric cars that can be charged purely from the sun -- they can emit less CO2 than most mass transit systems despite the lower passenger density because transit systems regularly use diesel buses or locomotives or run after dusk on electricity generated from coal and natural gas because they don't have internal batteries that can charge exclusively from the sun.
Somebody is going to invent some tires that last for 800,000 miles because they're made of something with such high internal cohesion they never get bald, or erode into something already commonly found in nature, and then people would find something else to complain about. And then someone would solve that too.
You are right, we will get bailed out by some yet uninvented technological solution and never face consequences for our own hubris. The climatologists are handwringing as you suggest because the solution is surely around the corner in the mind of some broccoli headed teen developed on a tick tock attention span. The ship will sail quite smoothly into the future. We have never been wrong before.
Your complaint was about tires, which is a much smaller problem than the ones that have known solutions, and one that has plausible solutions because it's a normal materials science problem.
"Climatologists" are talking about CO2, which is the thing we already have everything we need in order to solve. You use electric ground vehicles, charge them with solar panels or nuclear reactors. Use synthetic or biofuels for aircraft. Switch to electric heat pumps to heat buildings. This isn't a matter of "we don't know how to do it" or "the only option is to reduce energy consumption", it's only a question of whether people are willing to adopt these things fast enough, because adopting them faster sometimes costs more in the short-term. So that's still a thing we actually have to do, but it isn't really a question of what to do, only a question of how to get people to do the known thing.
You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
> In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX. “At the end of the vehicle’s life — 15 or 20 years down the road — you take the battery out of the car and it’s still healthy with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” Thomas said.
Meanwhile the battery replacement cost isn't $10k+. Nissan dealers charge $5500 for a new battery. Refurbished batteries are available for as little as $1000, with the obvious trade off that you'll have to replace it again sooner, but $1000 for another 3-5 years (with the option to do it again) could be a better choice for an older car than $5500 for another 10-15 years, depending on how much value you place on the inconvenience of disassembling your car to put it in again.
It's not the world's greatest car but if there was a carbon tax then it's cheap and fully electric.
There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later.
This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax revenue is distributed back to the population. In the first year, there will be more demand for efficient cars than existing supply, so they'll cost more. People who drive a lot will buy them anyway, but can use the refund to offset the cost. People who don't drive as much would eat the cost of the carbon tax on a less efficient vehicle, which isn't so bad because they don't drive as much, and then gets offset by the refund until more efficient cars filter into the used market. When that happens the tax revenue goes down because people have more efficient cars, so the refund gets smaller, but by then people don't need it as much because they have the more efficient cars.
I don’t believe any of this at all. Is anyone aware of any place where this has worked? If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.
If all we have is opinions, let’s go mine. Fortunately, we have data.
Take Australia for example.
1. We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t.
2. Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic. Approximately no one drives a small car, approximately everyone owns at least two 4x4 and or SUVs, and those that don’t tend to drive a turbo charged Skyline or Subaru or similar.
Everyone drives relatively new cars compared to, say, 30 years ago when half the population drove a rusty floor pan around, you were luck to have anything resembling an actual car hanging off it.
No one here gives a shit about climate change, except maybe our Australia Broadcasting Corporation, but approximately no one consumes any of their media, and even if ya do 97% of the time their performing their mandate of proportional representation by publishing media aimed at the LGTBQI+ fictious community 100% of the time.
To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff, and one hundred down ten to one the current buffoons get voted out and replaced by a potato promoting nuclear.
> We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t.
Australia briefly had something their politicians called a carbon tax, but it was really cap and trade, which is an entirely different system and is rubbish. In particular, you have to give ordinary people back the money the carbon tax collects or they'll rightfully hate it, which cap and trade does not.
And then, because the system they proposed was the miserable one, the opposition leader credibly threatened to repeal it (and then did), so hardly anyone bothered to try to save costs under a program they reasonably expected to quickly go away.
Actual carbon taxes have been implemented in parts of Europe and they do what they're expected to do.
> Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic.
People used to say "buy a smaller car" as the way to save fuel, since that used to be about the only way to do it. Then carmakers learned you could design an SUV with the use of a wind tunnel instead of shaping it like a brick and then use a smaller displacement engine with a turbo, or a hybrid system, and then you get SUVs with better fuel economy than subcompacts got in the 90s.
Even the huge stonking V8s still get modern aerodynamics and get significantly better mileage than the old ones did.
> To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff
Electric vehicles were never popular in Australia. Range is their Achilles heel and Australia is spread out. But then you do a plug-in hybrid that can operate as electric 90% of the time while completely solving the range issue.
It's really not. Australia is mostly uninhabited, with most people living in very few high density places.
The average commute distance in Australia is 16 kilometres; 90% of Australians live on the East Coast; 73% of Australian's commute less than 20 kilometres.[1]
Even Western Australian has people living outside of Perth, which, by the way, is the most remote centre of commerce in the world, has an average commute distance of 20.4 kilometres.[1]
The average Australian vehicle travels about 12,100 kilometres annually, that's all vehicles including freight vehicles.[2] The average household in Australia owns 1.8 cars[3], so very many Australian's would be well served by owning at least one purely electric vehicle, but don't.
You keep talking about data but then looking at the wrong data.
Average commute or distance traveled per year isn't the interesting number. If you're considering an electric car with a range of 300km, it doesn't matter if your average commute is 16km or 100km, what matters is, do you take trips in excess of 300km?
> The number of survey respondents who have taken a road trip increased to 91.9% in 2024 from 88.4% in the same survey in 2022
And if anything, fewer total miles traveled per year would make EVs less attractive there because of less in terms of fuel savings.
> Plug-in hybrids are mostly not a thing here.
Plug-in hybrids are relatively new because they're basically normal hybrids with bigger batteries, so the batteries had to get cheap and light enough to make that work, and they got faster adoption in countries like the US because of tax incentives that favor PHEVs over traditional HEVs. Meanwhile from your own link, 25% of new cars in Australia are some type of hybrid of BEV, compared to 19% in the US. Consistent with "they are buying more fuel efficient vehicles", it's just that those vehicles are turbocharged low displacement or hybrid SUVs.
It's possible that the difference in tax incentives is causing carmakers to allocate PHEVs to the countries providing incentives specifically for those given a finite amount of battery production capacity, but according to your own numbers PHEVs are a good fit for Australians. Average commute is well within their all-electric range but then you still have no trouble taking the occasional road trip.
I'm all for it. I owned a hybrid SUV for a bit, performance and fuel economy were quite pleasant. But I kinda need a van, and can't drive four cars simultaneously, and there aren't any hybrid vans available here.
As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.
I worry about a public opinion chaining on switching to opt-out in the US so it has to evaluated carefully.
I'm guessing the US wait time is long because there are a lot of people with failing kidneys due to poorly managed diabetes and high blood pressure. But there are a whole host of auto immune and genetic diseases also.
Now we have better drugs for treating diabetes like Ozempic and SGLT so hopefully that improves the situation for kidney failures caused by diabetes.
I myself had an auto immune disease IgA nephropathy 10 years back but at that time there were hardly any drugs targeting it. I've since was on dialysis and recently got a kidney transplant. But the positive at the same time a half dozen drugs have been approved or under trial to slow down the progression of IgA nephropathy.
From the article you linked
> We’re all for saving lives—we aren’t saying that we should stop self-driving cars so we can preserve a source of organ donation. But we also need to start thinking now about how to address this coming problem.
It doesn’t matter how much they try to walk it back and not sound so criminally insane. Refer again to my second paragraph: The issue is, would the author ever think of writing this article for any other instance of saving lives? If not, then it’s a case of selective focus, the same problem in this submission.
I mean, why not just say the organ shortage is bad, without pointing the finger at the latest hip, hot button issue, out of all the possible life-savers?
I dont think they are walking anything back. They seem a lot more positive about self driving cars then a lot of people. The controversial part of the article for most would be the suggestion to an allow organ market
The article is part of a series about challenges with future technologies. They note that 1/5 of donations come from traffic accidents and there is already a major shortage. If self driving cars reduce most accidents that will mean nearly 1/5 of donations will need to be replaced
You could also use some other way of looking at the problem instead of "lives". For example, from some morbidly accounted points of view, reducing deaths of able-bodied young people by incidentally increasing deaths of older, organ-needing people results in more "able-bodied life years" saved or something.
Of course, down this path too far and you start looking at prisoners and death sentences and organ harvesting, which I think most people would agree ain't right.
For instance, "Data centres cause pollution through high eletricity use" - high relative to what, residential housing? Aluminum smelting?
It's fine to be skeptical of the AI bubble, but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.
We also don't need any fizzy-drinks - shall we calculate the deaths due to pollution caused by that, let alone the primary effect on health of drink-victims? If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.