I love that the author took the time to do these estimates since there's so little non-vibey data on this topic. As always when it comes to climate change: Individual impact will not solve it...
I love that the author took the time to do these estimates since there's so little non-vibey data on this topic.
As always when it comes to climate change: Individual impact will not solve it whether it's driving an electric car or avoiding LLMs.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't reduce their footprint, I reduce mine in all sorts of ways. I think it sends an important message to society at large about what our values should be.
But policy, regulation and infrastructure are the actual solutions, which we can see all over the world in countries that are successfully reducing emissions.
When it comes to AI labs and datacenters: Make them fully offset their impact. Make it expensive not to use renewable power, enough that it makes economic sense for them to fund new green energy development in some cases. Same for water use, it would only take a nudge to make recirculating cooling the right financial choice.
It's hard without a unified federal approach though, when you have western states willing to sell large swaths of land and other approving fossil fuel plants to power them, and no federal...
It's hard without a unified federal approach though, when you have western states willing to sell large swaths of land and other approving fossil fuel plants to power them, and no federal leadership or will, it just won't happen.
That's true, in the US things are (hopefully temporarily) completely fucked federally when it comes to not destroying the environment. It's down to states, counties and towns, some of which are...
That's true, in the US things are (hopefully temporarily) completely fucked federally when it comes to not destroying the environment. It's down to states, counties and towns, some of which are doing encouraging things.
An individual using chatbots has a pretty negligible impact, with one prompt only amounting to roughly 1/150,000th of an average American’s daily emissions. Those numbers are basically right. They are also increasingly divorced from how AI is actually being used today.
The fastest-growing way that software engineers and scientists actually use AI is not typing questions into a chat box. Rather, we use AI agents through tools like Claude Code and Codex that plan, write code, run it, read the results, and iterate on their own.
My best estimate is that [my Claude Code use over 8 weeks] used around 170 kWh of data center electricity (with an uncertainty range of roughly 70 to 330 kWh across methods and assumptions).
That's quite reassuring, heavy daily agent use being less than a flight, or roughly equivalent to eating beef (my estimate); if you're a light user there's not too much to worry about, or at least...
That's quite reassuring, heavy daily agent use being less than a flight, or roughly equivalent to eating beef (my estimate); if you're a light user there's not too much to worry about, or at least it probably shouldn't be on top of your list of things to worry about, Co2 wise.
I love that the author took the time to do these estimates since there's so little non-vibey data on this topic.
As always when it comes to climate change: Individual impact will not solve it whether it's driving an electric car or avoiding LLMs.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't reduce their footprint, I reduce mine in all sorts of ways. I think it sends an important message to society at large about what our values should be.
But policy, regulation and infrastructure are the actual solutions, which we can see all over the world in countries that are successfully reducing emissions.
When it comes to AI labs and datacenters: Make them fully offset their impact. Make it expensive not to use renewable power, enough that it makes economic sense for them to fund new green energy development in some cases. Same for water use, it would only take a nudge to make recirculating cooling the right financial choice.
It's hard without a unified federal approach though, when you have western states willing to sell large swaths of land and other approving fossil fuel plants to power them, and no federal leadership or will, it just won't happen.
That's true, in the US things are (hopefully temporarily) completely fucked federally when it comes to not destroying the environment. It's down to states, counties and towns, some of which are doing encouraging things.
That's quite reassuring, heavy daily agent use being less than a flight, or roughly equivalent to eating beef (my estimate); if you're a light user there's not too much to worry about, or at least it probably shouldn't be on top of your list of things to worry about, Co2 wise.