alt Hacker NewsI think your anger would be better placed with the institutional barriers to building clean energy in America that prevent these infrastructure companies from doing the right thing
transmission via HVDC is extremely difficult to build due to land permitting and right of way laws
grid interconnections take 5+ years just to get approved, let alone built
only 2 nuclear power plants have been built since 1978, each taking over 10 years
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Are these companies expending any of their lobbying efforts or funds on this problem? Or are they just going to the easiest option? I'm not shedding any tears for the AI companies and their infra challenges. They're the ones driving a huge delta increase in energy use and emissions this coming decade, so their actions merit scrutiny and they are responsible for their actions and the resulting emissions that we will all suffer from. If I had my way, we'd stack an enormous carbon tax on all of them to force their hand.
Look, these companies are the ones selling a story of being benevolent (notwithstanding AI killing us all or putting everyone out of a job). And Anthropic is explicitly a B-corp. How does any of that square with taking any compute they can at any environmental cost?
The Memphis case to me is very illuminating: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260811-memphis-ai-da...
But it's ok, they're EAs and gave $1M to a Memphis nonprofit on 'AI education', while spending a $1B/ month renting Colossus:
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/anthropic-gifts-memphis-no...
People like Zuckerberg, Brin, Page and Musk have majority voting control of these companies.
They have amassed incredible power and vast fortunes in a time and era when doing so could only be done with great damage to the environment. Despite years of talk and superficial motions towards climate efforts these people have completely pivoted that signalling and have doubled down on endeavours that cause even more ecological destruction.
They have the power and means to do the right thing.
They chose not to.
Well, there's an admin killing clean energy so I think we know where that anger belongs. Dems suck too, but what can you do. One is worse, clearly.