Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.
The industrial resource utilization is being done to serve the consumer.
Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.
Very obviously, wagging your finger at consumers and hoping they change their behavior en masse will be far less effective than targeting the actual polluters directly. (Talk about motivated reasoning!)
No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level.
> further enriches a few already rich people.
Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!
Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them.
And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.
We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses.
> No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers
I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.
> And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.
Switching from meat to non-meat unequivocally lowers your GHG and water footprint and there's really no room for quibbling on this unless you are switching to a diet of exclusively almonds
It's not American evangelicals. It's been a long campaign and the evangelicals are still being targeted by Israel because no one else is left, but there aren't enough American evangelicals to swing things.
Not to mention, it often comes down to primary voters, to say nothing of Hollywood/media blacklists
> the Democrats are necessarily adversarial, but they clearly aren't as agreeable as a whole).
Democrats only changed recently. For some decades before that, the Israel lobby had significant sway over them (including allowing dems to publicly admit certain things).
CO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium.
Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone
warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.
Once FSD, we will make rules about the software that will have the effect of excluding Chinese companies. I seriously doubt that I'll see Chinese cars here in my lifetime.
The US already has social security, medicare, medicaid. It is often just plain worse/more brutal than Western European countries but the difference isn't a radical reimagination of the social order.
> barring the occasional Bernie
Western Europe has likewise not imagined any new government welfare since the 1970s.
Propaganda helps you ascend to power and then constrains what you do with that power.
Ultimately if you want to look objectively, you have to look at the concrete, at history. But propaganda matters: history would unfold differently without it!
If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...