Comment by Aurornis
8 hours ago
> To put this in perspective: world wide the emissions were ~ 37.8 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) in 2024 and 4.77 billion tonnes in the US. So, we're talking about 0.019 % of US emissions.
Thank you for putting it in perspective. All of these headlines that quote isolated emissions numbers without anything to compare it to are deliberately useless. It’s meant to ride the wave of anti-data center and anti-AI outrage, not to be actually useful for forming an opinion.
It’s also unhelpful when data center emissions is compared to personal household use or cars. The real comparison should be to other industrial and commercial operations. If we started putting datacenter emissions in context with other processes like global shipping, aluminum production, or other industrial scale activities people would realize it’s not a problem. Journalists aren’t doing that, though, because they want to tap into the anti-data center outrage in the zeitgeist right now.
> All of these headlines that quote isolated emissions numbers without anything to compare it to are deliberately useless.
I would go beyond that and say that they're deliberately misleading.
They're not quoting a big scary-sounding number out of context to try and be unhelpful - it's an intentional and active choice to push a specific narrative.