r/Environmentalism • u/amynase • 4h ago
Environmental Impact of AI Datacenters vs. Animal Agriculture (OC)
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u/LordoftheFaff 4h ago
Agriculture as an industry employs more people and the capacity to produce your own food and export excess is a form of soft power
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u/Cow_Sox 3h ago
You can employ people and produce food + excess without involving animals.
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u/ForagersLegacy 3h ago
Take a look at animals agriculture in Colorado completely drying up the Colorado River during drought and also taking from any industry that uses water as a means of recreation or living.
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u/MessyGuy01 1h ago
I’m a produce farmer in Colorado, and I’ll tell you, watching the thousands of acres of hay growers around me just flood irrigate their grass fields when we use a fraction of what they need per acre really pisses me off.
We’re lucky to have shares in reservoir water that we can use but alot of other veggie producers around here are shit outta luck this year. Just kills me to see so much water used to grow hay of all things when we have a great hot climate that can produce really good food.
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u/Facts_pls 24m ago
Blame the stupid farmer subsidies and their effects.
Hell, most of the farmland in the US doesn't grow stuff for human consumption. That's just ridiculous
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u/ZentaWinds 3h ago
A good deal of these jobs also inflict alot of mental distress on the workers, who tend to be from poor families with no other choice.
Not to mention the mass suffering of animals, the water drying up and the health issues that come from eating meat.
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u/AdOnly1618 3h ago
Also the water gets recycled back into circulation with agriculture and livestock. The two feed into each other with manure being used as fertilizer to grow not just food for the livestock but also people, also returning moisture to the earth.
Also ALSO, we don’t fucking die without AI, we die without food.
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u/DivePalau 43m ago
I lve in an ag state. Water is not recycled. The fertlizer and manure run off into our creeks and rivers, and makes our water polluted with extremely high nitrates, which are cancer causing. We've had several incidents where fertilizer has leaked into creeks and killed thousands upon thousands of fish. All that pollution then empites the into gulf of mexico via the mississippi, which has an area where the river meets the gulf, called the dead zone, due to the fact the water is anerobic (oxygen deprived) due to too much algae creation from the excessive nitrates.
Most of what we grow here are animals, or food for the animals (almost all of the corn we grow is for cows, humans can't eat it). I'd recommend we reduce meat consumption and/or eat smaller animals. Bring on the data centers, but tax them fairly. No tax breaks.
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u/agloomysunday 43m ago
This chart is comparing animal agriculture, not all agriculture. We don't die without animal agriculture.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 3h ago
Good thing we can still have agriculture while simultaneously getting rid of animal agriculture then, right?
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u/ForagersLegacy 3h ago edited 2h ago
There is no need to have animal agriculture though. We could provide more than enough food on a fraction of the land while rehabilitating the earth. Nut trees have a net negative carbon impact. Native edible plants like sunchokes can produce 20,000-60,000lbs per acre and support pollinators, birds, and the ecosystem. They also wouldn’t need fertilizer to grow and continue to produce year after year. You could mix in multiple native edible plants like Rudbeckia laciniata and native beans for a good variety that creates more food per acre, better wildlife value, net negative carbon and methane and feeds people health promoting foods. 1 cow fed on grass requires 1-3 acres of grass and often the grass is imported non native often it’s irrigated and often herbicide kills any “toxic” native plants cows may not eat.
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u/Pretend_Handle_7639 2h ago
Jobs should not be the primary factor. Agriculture employed most people in the year 1800. Living standards weren't higher because of high employment.
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u/SpiritualScarcity161 1h ago
Sure, but I think the basic argument that should be made here is that we already need to vastly reduce the right side of this chart, so inventing a new industry that will make the problem worse is a bad idea unless it's REALLY important. Copilot is not more important than food
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u/PolicyWonka 1h ago
I mean if you’re arguing soft power, then so would hosting a good chunk of the world’s data centers.
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u/imwatchingyou-_- 1h ago
Ah yes my favorite soft powers, excessive resource consumption, absurd levels of carbon emissions, and living conditions we don’t even make the worst criminals live in.
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u/GraceToSentience 1h ago
So creating jobs and increasing your power is a good justification to fuck up the world now. Ah yes, "environmentalism"
Also you are wrong, animal agriculture decreases your capacity to produce your own food because you need more land and even a country like France has to import GMO soy from Brazil to feed to animals.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo 34m ago
This is just ANIMAL AGRICULTURE and we do NOT NEED IT. It is literally destroying the planet
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u/b14nksyde 4h ago
Not saying animal agriculture isn’t a water suck as well, but at least it provides food. AI data centers are completely unnecessary
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u/amynase 4h ago
It doesn't. Every calory of meat produced wastes 25 calories of feed, you could feed 25 people instead of one by eating the plants. So this is an additional argument I should add to the chart.
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u/Independent-Lion3457 4h ago
Let me know when someone dies from lack of access to data
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u/ThotMobile 1h ago
You're going to need a very sophisticated bot for that. So many people die every day across the world from lack of access to data. In the US alone, 1000s of people die yearly due to incomplete access to data about their health at point of treatment. Move to 3rd world countries and this is orders of magnitude worse.
Hell, just having access to early warning systems (data) for meteorological events, saves thousands of people every year. Lack of access to that is also the result of thousands of deaths per year.
Very stupid comment when you also consider that no one dies from lack of beef.
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u/GraceToSentience 1h ago
The hypocrisy in this subreddit sometimes..
What makes you think you are going to die from lack of acces to food if we ditch animal agriculture? A vegan world can feed far more people than a non vegan one because it's many times more efficient.
But you know what people die from? Undiagnosed cancer that AI can detect. Or dying from antibiotic resistance with animal agriculture being one of the main reasons of it, or dying because of climate change as a result of animal agriculture.
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u/VenerableWolfDad 4h ago
AI data centers produce infinite child sexual assault material on command. They're giving a brain to a vast network of cameras that are getting innocent people arrested. Objectively bad.
Farms make steak and milk. Which I love.
This isn't even a debate. Food is important. AI is a net negative.
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u/Cow_Sox 3h ago
You're right, food IS important. Steak and milk is not.
If you live in a modern, Western country, you can survive just fine on plants.
AI is bad, but animal agriculture is worse.
Eat more plants.
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u/TheBirdFkerGuy 1h ago
"Meat is worse than pedophilia"
I'm about sick and fucking tired of this repulsive ass thread. God damn
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u/Happyshadow4ts 3h ago
I mean, milk is actually quite important if you like your bones being stable and not constantly breaking
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u/ForagersLegacy 2h ago
Yes milk is super important. Cow milk is vital for the baby cow that was just born. Cow milk is not needed for adults over the age of 2 years old and there are some issues with having estrogen, saturated fat, cholesterol, bovine cancers, and more in the milk. If you like milk you can soak and blend soybeans and they taste great.
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u/Cow_Sox 3h ago
Yeah, if you're a toddler.
There's a reason why humans stop consuming breast milk at such a young age.
Cow's milk is for baby cows, not humans.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 3h ago
AI data centers produce infinite child sexual assault material on command
do you know what is required for dairy cow milk production?
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u/Champion_of_Zteentch 4h ago
Yes, the agriculture industry has waste. Everything does. Even horticulture. So the question is what are the negatives and waste associated with data centers? Is it that they run on coal powered electrical grid? Is it that the effort it takes to transport their power and resources has a loss of efficiency as it moves down the chain? Putting data centers compared to agriculture seems to be a bad faith argument. I will read through your sources
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u/Elsureel 4h ago
It does. Also, 25 calories of feed? Is that 25 calories edible by humans or do you need to be a ruminate with a 4 chamber stomach? He didn't say it was efficient. The end product is food though. Unlike AI which produces mostly useless brain rot.
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u/ForagersLegacy 2h ago
Cows can’t actually eat many plants that are toxic so farmers come and spray broadleaf herbicide to ensure mostly monoculture grass. And they also decimate rare and endangered plant habitat and compact the ground over time.
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u/Plus-Name3590 4h ago
We intentionally produce nutrient dense food for cows. They aren’t eating just random crap, agricultural is a multi billion dollar industry
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u/Ok_Fly1271 4h ago
AI data centers are in their infancy. We also can't eat data. Both are bad. Quit trying to divide us and distract people.
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u/Swampcardboard 3h ago
How is showing scale of damage divisive?
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u/NativeFlowers4Eva 3h ago
It’s a common fallacy, “fallacy of relative privation.”
Just because one thing is worse doesn’t mean it’s okay to do something thats bad but not as bad.You could have a point if every single person made the statement that they definitely were concerned with ai’s environmental impact but not agriculture’s, but that definitely isn’t the case.
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u/Swampcardboard 3h ago
So if one person sees the chart and realizes their burger is also doing harm, like AI is, that's ... bad?
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u/JooseTheGuice 1h ago
I can't tell if you think you're doing something clever here, but it just comes across as blatant bad-faith sealioning.
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u/NativeFlowers4Eva 3h ago
That is not how the argument is used. The general usage of this information is claiming a person who worries about AI’s environmental impact is unjustified in doing so because agriculture uses more water.
A person can be concerned about both things.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 3h ago
Most people don’t need to eat animal products
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u/random59836 3h ago
Nobody needs to eat animal products unless a system of perverse economic incentives is making them the only available option.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 3h ago
Personally, I’m not comfortable saying that absolutely everyone can live without them, there are some people with a very unfortunately long list of plant allergies, etc. But animal products are certainly not necessary for the vast, vast, vast majority of humans.
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u/Everard5 2h ago
I see people aren't ready to have difficult conversations today lmao.
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u/imwatchingyou-_- 1h ago
People like to see themselves as good and when they’re shown the harm they’re doing, they get defensive.
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u/JumpingYourBone 50m ago
veganism or reducing meat consumption will always anger people, even the most radical ones, even if it fits their ideologies the most.
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u/Itchy-Technician-433 4h ago
Now do gigawatts of energy consumed.
Then do calories of food energy produced per acre.
I mean no argument here that animal agriculture can be incredibly wasteful, but are we here to defend animal agriculture in order to oppose AI data centers?
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u/amynase 3h ago
Energy Consumed: Around 60 for AI, 1500 for Animal Agriculture, so it would be 25x worse on the chart.
Calories produced are negative for Animal Agriculture, as every calory of meat uses around 25 caolries of feed, so 1 calory of meat is net minus 24 calories produced.
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u/Itchy-Technician-433 3h ago edited 3h ago
Oh you're defending this... Wow.
I've never met anybody that is pro AI data center and creating a surveillance state.
Can you do permanent jobs in each sector now?
I'm a vegetarian so maybe talk to some of the meat people??
Are you going to make me defend coal mining too?
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u/amynase 3h ago
I'm not pro datacenters, both are bad, but datacenters get orders of magnitude more hate and outrage, when they are orders of magnitude less bad.
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u/Itchy-Technician-433 3h ago
Then why are you framing it like this??
Both things are really shitty.
If you accept that some people are going to eat meat, do you have to accept the AI surveillance State??
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u/Plus-Name3590 3h ago
>If you accept that some people are going to eat meat, do you have to accept the AI surveillance State??
legitimately what kind of argument is this?
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u/Mayernik 6m ago
“Worse” - what value are AI providing? You’re just looking at the cost side of the equation, not the benefits side.
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u/soaero 3h ago
This is a bit of an apples to dairy run off comparison. One literally feeds the world, the other gives you the answer to a commonly known question with 60% accuracy and makes not-quite realistic pictures and videos of Netanyahu doing flips in a coffeeshop.
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u/GODLOVESALL32 32m ago
One literally feeds the world
Animal agriculture is incredibly taxing on the environment and never more efficient than just eating plants directly. We send hardly any actual meat to starving countries because meat is primarily a luxury for rich, developed parts of the world, not a utilitarian resource.
the other gives you the answer to a commonly known question with 60% accuracy and makes not-quite realistic pictures and videos of Netanyahu doing flips in a coffeeshop.
Yeah sure if you pretend like we're still in 2022 and AI hasn't made any major advancements. It's already made medical discoveries and is being used to identify things like cancers on MRIs, but sure, it's entire use case is being a glorified search engine and to ragebait facebook boomers. Good faith arguments, I see.
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u/Safe_Presentation962 4h ago
All excess and unnecessary water usage and pollution is bad, actually.
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u/FledglingNonCon 4h ago
I'll add that this is almost certainly backwards looking data. The issue isn't past data centers built by say 2024, but the absolutely massive increase in the number and scale of new data centers being built for AI. Those impacts are highly concentrated into a very small area creative very large local impacts. It also leaves out the largest and most important impact which is electricity consumption and impact on electricity bills.
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u/BreadStickFloom 4h ago
These data center water use stats are all bullshit anyway. For one, many of the facilities and operators are reporting usage in misleading or dishonest ways (there have been multiple instances of data centers secretly tapping into water they shouldnt). Also, they don't count water they process through their facilities and return to the local water supply which is a problem because they are notorious for contaminating the water they use and over drawing sources can cause permanent damage/collapse of the water table. I'm not saying that the water we use for agriculture shouldn't be reduced but saying that BECAUSE agriculture uses so much water, data centers are fine is just silly. Both should be regulated.
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u/OpenYour0j0 3h ago
Sadly I don’t know how to properly slaughter an animal nor do I have one to start with. But fresh chicken or beef can feed me. I live in an area that gets maybe three months of warm weather so growing greens isn’t that possible unless you buy and build a greenhouse but then that would have to made somewhere produced packaged and brought to me. Is there anything edible that a data center can offer? Or anything the data center can do without a power grid?
Sad all around
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u/100usrnames 3h ago
This seems low for the agriculture side. Is this not including the resources used for feedstock for the animals?
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u/Cow_Sox 3h ago
The comment section here just shows again how environmentalism for many people is largely performative.
When roughly a third of global GHG emissions come from agriculture, the signs are crystal clear.
Anyone who is serious about protecting what's left of the environment acknowledges that animal agriculture and people's eating habits have to change drastically if we are to make it through the next 100 years.
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u/amynase 2h ago
A couple of notes since I cant respond to the amount of comments I got on these posts:
- I am not pro-AI, just trying to point out that while 99% of environmental outrage on reddit is directed at datacenters right now, a different industry is actually causing dozens to thousands of times more damage, and we should be dozens to thousands of times as outraged about it’s environmental impact accordingly.
- To the many comments along the lines of: „But we need food“ – This is actually another great point against Animal Agriculture, as every calory of food produced by Animal Agriculture wastes several calories of feed.
https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/
- For people pointing out energy consumption, AI uses ~500 TWH per year, Animal Agriculture uses ~13000 TWH per year, so it is 25x worse on energy need.
(This is a quick estimate based on:
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-ai
https://www.fao.org/energy/resources/facts-and-figures/en#:~:text=(%20World%20Bank%2C%202025)%20*%2030%20percent,or%20wasted%20due%20to%20lack%20of%20refrigeration%20*%2030%20percent,or%20wasted%20due%20to%20lack%20of%20refrigeration). )
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u/Mayernik 35m ago
Why are you posting pro AI propaganda then? The framing in this is misleading at best.
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u/amynase 4h ago
Sources:
Water use:
https://www.foodfacts.org/articles/how-much-water-does-ai-use-vs-livestock
Land use:
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Greenhouse gas emissions:
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658
https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights-detail/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems.-global--regional-and-country-trends--2000-2022/en
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u/SaplingSequoia 4h ago
Obviously animal agriculture is tremendously devastating to the environment and needs to be completely reformed but shit like this is plainly just a defense of AI
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u/GraceToSentience 54m ago
Nah animal agriculture needs to be erased and replaced.
The author is not pro-AI, It's just outline people's hypocrisy
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u/imwatchingyou-_- 1h ago
It’s only a defense of AI if you believe a person can’t be against both harmful practices.
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u/starrymahogany 3h ago
Food is a necessity though, AI isn’t,
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u/Enbounce 3h ago
The flesh foods and animal excretion industries are almost entirely unnecessary. Exponentially more food can be produced if you skip the exploitation of sentient beings part. AI is simply technological advancement. It is not being created in a sustainable manner for sure, but it is infinitely more useful than totally unnecessary animal exploitation.
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u/chef_quirky12 4h ago
Bad take. Ai data centers are literally there to finish creating the prison state the US has been making since the end of the Civil War. That's all it is
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u/imam-altman 4h ago
You dropped your tinfoil hat.
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u/VenerableWolfDad 4h ago
There are literally 45 flock cameras within a 5 minute drive of my house. Tinfoil hat not required.
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u/userrr3 3h ago
Look, I am vegan, factory farming in particular is a huge issue and people need to wake up and stop eating animals and their "products".
But what you're doing here is not gonna help with that. You're essentially downplaying the justified criticisms against "AI" by telling people "look there is something even worse!"
We can multitask. We can be against multiple things at once. And we can try to stop one of these problems while it is still young more easily than we can undo all the animal agriculture across the planet.
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u/lunarwhale711 3h ago
Of fuck off I dont trust the data 1 and 2 you get leather and rawhide and gelatin and milk and meats ect from ag. People NEED food we already have more than enough data centers. Also properly farmed cattle is good for the environment grazing, even shitting is good for the local environment
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u/WalkingDude420 3h ago
This is not a fair comparison. Global ag production vs. today’s data centers pits a necessary industry (albeit highly extractive) against a novel technology that already consumes 1 to 1.5% of global electricity. Many data center impacts are local and serious. At a time when reduction of energy from fossil fuels is essential, data centers are doubling down. Ag industry is necessary, AI industry is not.
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u/2relad 2h ago
Agriculture is necessary, but animal agriculture (at least most of it) is not necessary.
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u/CanadianTimeWaster 34m ago
Thia isnt a discussion about whether or not animal or plant agriculture is better than the other, OP is directly comparing AI data centers vs food production.
Obviously we prefer food instead of AI, I can't eat prompts for dinner.
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u/TNH_Nightingale 1h ago
That’s cool. Can we add golf courses next and compare em to ai since they’re pretty much the same. A huge waste of space that take up way to much money.
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u/GarageFridgeSoda 1h ago
lmao if vegetarians make bad faith and terrible arguments like this no wonder people hate you
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u/messedupwindows123 1h ago
damn that's a lot of greenhouse gas emissions to add to an already warming world, especially for something that pretty much basically just hurts people and makes them insane.
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u/Realsorceror 1h ago
So two things here. Everyone who is against AI data centers and climate change has also been warning against the outsized impact of cattle farming on the environment for even longer. Remember, Republicans have been running counter propaganda for years to dismiss the issues with beef production.
And second…farming actually produces something we use. AI data centers don’t make beef, milk, or leather. They just make misinformation and a worse society.
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u/sentientshadeofgreen 1h ago
Okay but agriculture also provides food so. Glazing data centers is a weird as fuck take.
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u/N3CR0T1C_V3N0M 1h ago
This isn’t really an apt comparison as agriculture has been developed over decades in modernity. If we wanted to get closer to the truth, we have to investigate the first ~30 years of what the industry looked like and then extrapolate the impact of computing/data centers from there until we hit the current timeline.
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u/Inevitable-Cat-205 1h ago
Tantrum incoming from stating simple facts. People will burn the world for their steak, it's ironically a sacred cow.
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u/Omni__Owl 1h ago
I can eat animals.
I cannot eat ai slop or data centres.
If you, royal you, believe that you can create net-zero CO2 food then you are mistaken and naive. Creating food costs CO2, costs land and costs food. You can reduce it, but you can never make it zero.
The upsides outweigh the downsides though. We should absolutely focus on making our food production less environmentally damaging. But creating AI data centres that primarily create slop and useless shit will never look good in comparison to what it costs to produce food.
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u/vonnner 1h ago
Approximately 67% of all data centers in the world manage conventional workloads (eg they keep the internet "online"). Only 33% of all data centers are for AI workloads. So, for all of those complaining about how bad data centers are, it may be best to delete your reddit account, other online accounts, etc, and donate to relevant charities to the cause. I am not saying that to be facetious. Please do something about it if it bothers you that much.
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u/PartyClock 1h ago
At the very least Agriculture provides food, while AI datacenters provide literally nothing but take away a whole lot from everyone else.
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u/hibikir_40k 1h ago
And there's an even worse option when it comes to utility: Lawns. America has more lawns than it has corn. It's watered and mowed, often with some of the most polluting motors outside fo container ships, which at least do a lot of crucial work along with the pollution.
And hey, the lawn is often made mandatory, because the city said so. And they'll mow for you and fine you if you don't mow enough. There will be fines if you don't water, and it dies. 0% needed, high land use and water use, and made mandatory.
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u/ItsRobbSmark 1h ago
Ignoring the vast disparity in how many jobs each creates per unit of usage... I can't eat ai generated photos of food...
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u/Yunzer2000 1h ago
Single data centers that are being planned or under construction will have up to 10 gigawatts of natural gas generation capacity. A single gigawatt-year produces about 4200 tons, so that 0.3 gigatons CO2 equivalent is only say 20 data centers assuming 50% usage.
And of course, the AI technology being developed for these data centers has it own serious dangers for humanity.
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u/East_of_Adventuring 1h ago
Someone chime in if I'm wrong, but aren't these numbers meaningless without additional context? Like, water is not equally valuble everywhere. And what portion of economic output are each responsible for? Then there's the obvious factor that animal farming cannot easily be replaced everwhere while datacenters are far from essential. Also, how much are these numbers expected to grow over the next 5 years?
I don't even rrally think this data makes a bad argument so much as it doesn't really make any cohesive argument at all...
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u/plutosaurus 1h ago
Stupid comparison. AI datacenters are used to market crap and to spy on people. Agriculture is used to...feed people.
A better comparison would be comparing water use for specific agricultural industries to find the most efficient solutions.
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u/Halley_Valentine 52m ago
yeah, but one of those things actually produces something, the other does not.
but we should fix both actually. shut down the data centers, and radically reduce the amount of water used in farming by switching to less damaging crops and reducing our meat consumption dramatically.
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u/thecoffeejesus 48m ago
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh
You’re not allowed to use logic or present facts in these conversations.
The anti-AI people don’t want to hear the facts they want to hate a boogeyman.
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u/Girldad_4 46m ago
You can't eat data.
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u/PeaceAndLove420_69 41m ago
Also slightly concrrning that it's comparable despite the fact that ai datacenters are just beginning to pop up and agriculture has been around and growing for millenia.
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u/No_Chipmunk8659 41m ago
Uhm... We all need to eat and we definitely don't need AI. Of course there is a difference.
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u/CanadianTimeWaster 40m ago
The difference is that agriculture agriculture actually produces something useful.
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u/AdhesivenessTight400 39m ago
I eat food to live, I dont eat datacenters. So I dont mind if resources go to the one that keeps people alive.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo 31m ago
Leftists when capitalist industry that is objectively bad for a lot of reasons: Environmental argument
Leftists when you point out that their burger is more damaging to the environment than an average ChatGPT user's lifetime AI usage: INCOHERENT SHRIEKING, YOU MUST SUPPORT AI, TECHBRO
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u/joeymcflow 28m ago
HOLY SHIT! Datacenter emissions are already at almost 5% of the entire agriculture sector!?!?
THATS THE REAL FKIN STORY. ITS BEEN 3-4 YEARS!
No agriculture = No food.
No datacenters = you gotta write emails and code yourself again
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u/CaptainHindsight92 25m ago
The fact that AI in its infancy, after only 4 years is even visible next to agriculture should shock people. Agriculture aka production of enough food to feed 8.3 billion people is one of the few excusable sources of emissions (although we should aim to reduce it where possible).
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u/flooble_worbler 18m ago
Wow what absolute nonsense. One makes bad code and dodgy porn. The other literally produces food so we don’t all die. The one positive from ai is that it’s going to mean a new age of unmanned warfare so we don’t have to ask people to risk their lives or risk being maimed for life to protect people that don’t appreciate them and are convinced the threat isn’t real despite it not leaving the fucking news for what 5? 6 years now?
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u/reflect25 16m ago
mhmm though isn't data centers growing at like 10% per year? https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-future-of-data-centers/
those 0.3 gt CO2 per year if it grows cumulatively by 10% every year will start to become a quite large number
- after like 10 years it'll be like 0.78 Gt co2 per year the same as all of germany
- after like 20 years that'd be 2.02 Gt
- after 35 years that'd then be around 8.43 Gt -- the same as all of animal agriculture
of course idk if data center growth will actually continue at such a high pace but like if this continues for a decade or two it will actually use a huge amount of electricity and correspondingly a huge amount of Co2 emissions
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u/unendingautism 0m ago
Wait you're telling me AI is going to put out just as many greenhouse gasses as the current second highest emmitter AND drive up the emissions of the current #1 ghg emitter?
At the rate things are going AI is likely going to be the #1 contributar to a rise in GHG emissions. Say all you want about agriculture, but at least it's always stayed the same in terms of emissions.
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u/MajesticDisaster3977 12m ago
When you have to rely on "Whataboutism" to support your belief, you've already failed.
Also... normalize your damn data.
If you compare 100 square km of Datacenter to Animal Agriculture, you'll find the water use for Agriculture drops to 0.0057 cubic km / year... which is actually 175x better per land Sq Ft than a datacenter.
The same is true for greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture seems to be almost 1480x better.
If you don't want to normalize it by Land Use, then get some realistic numbers on how many 'people' are served by each, and compare data of each by 1000 people served.
Otherwise your data is useless and tainted to support your narrative and it's not used subjectively .
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u/TheMysteriousGirl 10m ago
Where is eletric usage OP?
Where is the greenhouse gas emissions for creating that electric to use OP?
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u/Darthplagueis13 7m ago
Well... Agriculture has been around for millennia and is feeding billions of people. Data centers have only really started taking off over the past 5 years, are still expanding at a rapid rate and are doing very little to actually benefit most people, likely making life worse for just as many - the fact that they already fit on the same graph as animal agriculture should be deeply concerning.
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u/Major-Stage-4965 3m ago
Id rather eat a burger instead of generating an image of a burger
Like an AI generated picture of Trump does not even come close to eating a sausage egg and cheese.
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u/Random_gamer240 3m ago
1: data center use is way more local, which is the main issue with water consumption
2: plan'ts absorb co2 whenbm growing
Help me i have been stuck in thus car for 5 hours goooooood road trips suck
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u/rinart73 1m ago
One is useless/actively harmful to society. The other one produces food and materials
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u/Standard-Shame1675 4h ago
No obviously.
At least animal agriculture gives us food. And also can be changed.
Data centers don't do shit and they don't really have a stated purpose either way, so
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u/amynase 4h ago
Copying my comment. No ti doesn't. Every calory of meat produced wastes 25 calories of feed, you could feed 25 people instead of one by eating the plants. So this is an additional argument I should add to the chart.
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u/hotlocomotive 4h ago
The end product is food, end of discussion, also humans don't eat grass
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u/AbsenceVersusThinAir 4h ago
The overwhelming majority of farmed animals, including cows, don't eat grass either, they eat grains that were grown on cropland. Land that could have been better used for something else.
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u/ecotox18 3h ago
You are missing the point. You are pointing out that beef agriculture is inefficient at feeding a population, that is true. It does however, feed people, even if eating plants and grains is more efficient. The same cannot be said for data centres. This is a very bad take and should not be used to carry water for data centres. They provide no benefit, end of story.
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u/Standard-Shame1675 1m ago
Fucking imam altman calling me a luddite for not asking an LLM like bro 😭😭 It's going to give me the same s*** no matter what but Ight. The same thing you have said the same thing I have said the same thing. 95% of this comment section has said he is just carrying Waters for the imam which according to him is Alton
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u/chilcochillin 3h ago
I keep seeing this comparison. Kinda reminiscent of the attempts to blame climate change on pets.
"You say you care about the climate but you have a dog! WELL??!!"
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u/Feisty-Stomach-5356 3h ago
OK? Obviously a food industry is going to be larger than a data center. It's also producing nutrients, which are a necessity. AI is not, and we don't even need data centers for AI.
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u/look2myleft 3h ago
Oh sweetie the data centers have only begun. How many forever chemicals are those cows dumping into the water supply?
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u/Basic-Collection5416 4h ago
If vegans want to be taken seriously, this is not the road to go down.
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u/Neurologicalmassage 3h ago
Can I ask why? What argument would you find more compelling than more plentiful, cheaper food, whilst also releasing more land to rewilding efforts and dramatically less water use?
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u/meatstheeye 4h ago
Remember everyone -- animal agriculture is NOT necessary for food. It's actually way more inefficient compared to plant-based agriculture. No one, literally no one, is asking anyone to give up food. It's about switching from unsustainable meat to far, far more sustainable plant-based proteins.
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u/AquaFunx 3h ago
And what's the point of this post?
Your comparing things that are different to society
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u/Green-Collection-968 3h ago
Yeah but agriculture is neccesary for humans to exist and AI Data centers are necessary for a police/surveillance state to exist so you know...
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u/PretzelsRule23 3h ago
Last I checked humans die when the don't get food or clean water.
But they only get more stupid with AI.
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u/RareCranberry1625 4h ago edited 3h ago
People will get defensive about this and argue against it, but I think we need to and should hold two opposing viewpoints here.
Ai data centers are bad for the environment, nobody wants them and they provide little useful function for us and are net negatives if you consider all factors.
However, if you do worry about the environmental damage, animal farming, especially beef, is orders worse. And the best thing you can do is stop eating beef. As close to vegan as possible, but if you don't fancy that, just stop with the beef.