Officials are pleading with people to help reduce demand.

Sorta like how corporations pushed recycling onto the public to deflect from their own culpability for pollution. Why would we regulate the companies building huge data centers when we can get average people to absorb the cost? It’s not like they’re making obscene profits while laying off untold thousands.

I mean, if that was the case, sure, let’s have them pay to clean up the waste they generate. But have you seen NVIDIA, Microsoft, or Meta lately? These companies are barely staying in business. Their CEOs can hardly afford to ride the bus to work. Let’s cut them a break.

TLDR: It’s your fault the earth is dying because you horde emails.

  • tabris@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    22 hours ago

    I’ll say it again, because I think the idea is a practical solution to the issue: electricity and water usage should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive it becomes.

    This would actually incentivise companies to reduce their usage, to question if they actually need that new AI data centre that will eat up all the gains in renewable electricity production and require fossil fuel plants to continue running, it’ll reduce the crypto miners as well, and encourage everyone to try to reduce their usage.

    The knock on effect of this is that electricity actually becomes cheaper for everyone.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
      1·
      9 hours ago

      I don’t think that’s a good idea. There are industries that need huge amounts of energy and produce things that are actually useful, like the aluminum smelting industry. They can actually help to stabilize the electrical grid by ramping their production up or down depending on how much energy is being produced at a given time. It’s good for those industries (energy is cheaper when there’s an excess available), good for the power company (they need to keep the grid stable), and good for renewables (balancing supply and demand is a big problem with less consistent energy sources).

      What I think we need is regulations penalizing non-productive energy use, like crypto mining and generative AI training.